Most of the time the coaches give me answers that have to do with getting more traffic to my website, getting more people on my list or getting enough coaching clients. The interesting thing is even my other clients – healers, therapists, authors and other service providers – give me similar answers.

While it true that as a life coach you may need more traffic to your coaching website or you need more coaching clients in your practice, it may not be the most pressing problem in your coaching business. And often, getting more traffic to your coaching website isn’t.

But for most of my coaching clients, the most pressing problem can be elusive. This is because usually the most pressing problem in your business has nothing to do with your marketing or generating traffic to your coaching website. Rather it usually has to do with how you actually DO your business.

Think about it for a moment.

Let’s say I could triple the number of contacts you get from your coaching website in the next month (which is possible, by the way). What would happen? Could you actually manage having that many more potential coaching clients contacting you about your coaching services? How effectively would you be at converting these potential clients into actual coaching clients? Or would you end up dropping the ball on a whole bunch of your potential clients?

If you’re like most life coaches I’ve spoken with, you likely believe that more people contacting you means more coaching clients paying you.

Yet, that’s not always the case. More often than not, you need to prepare yourself, your business, your business processes and your coaching practice for this sort of growth. So you need to know how to deal with such a large influx of potentially new coaching clients. Which means to continue to have a successful coaching practice you must have solid systems in place to manage these sorts of situations.

Now how these systems get created is neither difficult nor overly complex. It’s simply a matter of knowing what your business problems are and what you need to do about them in order to grow your coaching practice. After that, you simply figure out how to adjust your already existing business practices to support the growth. But if you don’t make adjustments to how you do things, the growth you experience will likely not be significant and will almost certainly not be sustainable. So if you want to get more clients in your coaching practice, you must consider how you’ll handle not only the coaching sessions, but all the things that happen to gain that coaching client.

So as a life coach, how do figure out what your most pressing business problems are?

The easiest way is through Reverse engineering. Start with the end result. Consider what challenges you’d face if you had double, or even triple, the number of people contacting you about your coaching services, for instance.

Another way to find your most pressing problems is think about the task in your coaching business that you least enjoy doing. It’s pretty likely that you’ll find some issues there. For instance, there was a timein my own business when invoicing my clients was a pain for me. Of course, it presented a huge problem for me that I dreaded doing the thing that got me paid. So I had to look at this and find a new way to invoice my clients – a way that would be easier and much less time-consuming. I found my invoicing solution and now I can invoice clients so quickly and easily that I rarely even think about it, let alone dread it.

So you want to look for the things that aren’t working in doing your business. Find the holes in your coaching practice and fill them. To fill those holes, start thinking in reverse and consider what you’re doing well, don’t enjoy or simply don’t know how to do. Start there. Consider all the steps along the way. Write it all down, turn it upside down and now you’ve got the outline for a plan. Focus on the issue closest to where you are now, and you likely have, at least one of, your most pressing business problem.

Plan your coaching practice for success

We so often tell our coaching clients to plan for success. Why couldn’t that mean imagine the success you want and work backward to where you are today? It’s a little secret – and it works!

What is the most pressing problem in your coaching practice? In your business? And what are you doing about it?

Let’s talk about it!

note: image from tashland on Flickr, some rights reserved)